WHAT IS VERNACULAR?

by John A. Kouwenhoven
1948

The forms we have so long neglected are in reality the
products of a unique kind of folk art, created under
conditions which had never before existed. They represent
the unself-conscious efforts of common people, in America
and elsewhere, to create satisfying patterns out of the
elements of a new and culturally unassimilated
environment; but this patternmaking is something
altogether different from the folk arts which in recent years
have been collected and studied with such enthusiasm. It
has nothing in common with the balladry of the Kentucky
mountaineers or the decorative crafts of the Pennsylvania
Dutch. Unlike these, it is the art of sovereign, even if
uncultivated, people rather than of groups cut off from the
main currents of contemporary life. The patterns it evolved
were not those which are inspired by ancient traditions of
race or class; on the contrary, they were imposed by the
driving energies of an unprecedented social structure. In
their least diluted form these patterns comprise the folk
arts of the first people in history who, disinherited of a
great cultural tradition, found themselves living under
democratic institutions in an expanding machine
economy.

It is this unique factor of a democratic-technological
vernacular which has been overlooked in our estimates of
art in the United States. The development of folk-art forms
is always hard to trace. No one bothers to note the patterns
of colors, shapes, sounds, and ideas which plain people
produce--at least no detailed record is kept until long after
the patterns have crystallized and have become habitual. It
is especially difficult to trace the emergence of this
vernacular, for the patterns through which it evolved were
not designed to be kept in frames on the wall, or cherished
behind glass doors. These patterns formed tools,
machines, buildings, and other objects for use in the
routine of daily life. It was into the design of useful things
that these people inevitably turned the universal creative
instinct. Repressed artistic impulses found release in
uncounted rudimentary and personal expressions.

The purest form of this vernacular, the form in which its
characteristics are most clearly revealed and can be most
readily defined, is represented by technological design.
Here craft tradition had least influence and the
characteristic impulses of the new civilization were freest to
display their energy in patterns available to all the people,
cultivated and uncultivated alike.

The men and women who built a civilization in the
American wilderness had to relearn a truth which many of
their European contemporaries had been able to get along
without: the truth of function. They had to become familiar
with the nature of materials and the use of tools. The
frontier country was strange indeed to those who had been
accustomed to the ways of the older culture. James Hall,
writing in the Illinois Monthly Magazine for June 1831,
warned the Western emigrant that he must abandon his
predilections, prejudices, and local attachments. "Instead
of bringing society with him," Hall wrote, "he should
cultivate the intimacy of the inhabitants, and by imbibing
their feelings and sentiments learn to relish their society."
And like his predilections and prejudices, his customary
tools also had ultimately to be abandoned.

The United States won its independence from Britain
with the aid of a tool which had been developed, though
not invented, on the frontier. When Washington took
command of the Continental Army at Boston he brought
with him fourteen hundred frontier riflemen from western
Pennsylvania. The Massachusetts troops who watched
these leather-jacketed irregulars assemble on Cambridge
Common jeered at the incredibly long-barreled guns which
the strangers carried; there was something absurd about
the length of such weapons in comparison with the stubby,
smooth-bore firelock muskets which both the English and
Massachusetts men were using. But Washington had been
in western Pennsylvania some years before and had seen
what those ungainly men could do with their ungainly
weapons; and that afternoon on Cambridge Common the
Massachusetts men saw too. The lanky Westerners drove
seven-inch target posts into the ground and then strode off
to take firing position: fifty yards, a hundred yards (at that
distance a man with a smooth-bore musket could have hit
such a small target only by sheer luck), a hundred and fifty
yards, two hundred yards, two hundred and fifty yards.
There they stopped, lined up in ragged order, and fired;
and they hit the posts.

Here was a weapon which revolutionized fighting
techniques. Men armed with these rifles didn't have to
stand in line, like the British at Bunker Hill, firing volleys at
short range and hoping some of the bullets hit someone.
This was the Pennsylvania version of the German rifle-barreled
gun, developed during the 1730s and 1740s by
patient experiment among the gunsmiths around Lancaster,
a hunting tool which could pick off a 'coon or a rabbit at
long range in the lonely forests. And these rifles played a
significant part in America's victory; for so greatly did the
enemy dread their effectiveness that, as Roger Burlingame
tells the story, Washington later asked other troops to wear
the costume of the men who used them, even though there
were nowhere near enough of the rides to go around.

The tools whose design first showed the influence of the
American environment were, as one would expect, those
which were most widely used in getting food, clearing the
land, and making it fertile. The men who came over from
Europe brought with them axes, spades, hayforks, manure
forks, and plows, and used them as long as they lasted. But
when these tools wore out it was difficult to import others,
and local blacksmiths hammered out new ones for their
neighbors.

Changes in design under such circumstances are made
only very gradually; it was quite a while before there was a
noticeable difference between the tools used in America
and those still used in Europe. But changes nevertheless
occur, as old habits give way to new requirements. Fenimore
Cooper observed in 1828 that American plows were
more "graceful and convenient" and American axes more
admirable "for form, for neatness, and precision of weight"
than their English equivalents, and by the middle of the
nineteenth century, when the Great Exhibition at the Crystal
Palace in London provided the first general opportunity
for comparative study of the products of all nations, differences
were strikingly apparent.

Twenty-five years later the reports of European observers
at the United States Centennial Exhibition, held in
1876 at Philadelphia, were filled with detailed descriptions
of characteristic American designs. Among the reports of
the British Commission, for example, there is a comparison
of British and American tools. Commissioner David McHardy
noted that the English axe was bulky, while the
American was thinned considerably below the eye--a shape
which "enables it to be more easily drawn out after the
blow is given, and the body of the axe, being much firmer,
is not liable to twist in working." Again, in his report on
agricultural and laborers' tools, he expressed surprise that
the great improvements which had been made in the
United States had not been introduced into Europe many
years before. The old-style hayfork, for example, with its
iron ferrule and strong ash handle, was "a very cumbrous
tool"; the manure fork, with its three prongs--usually flat
and about an inch broad, but occasionally made in the
more efficient V shape--was doubly so. "No accurate judgment,"
he wrote, "can be formed of the many advantages
which have been conferred on the laborer by the introduction
of the American steel spade, shovel, manureforks and hayforks."
An iron spade quickly became caked with dirt, an
iron fork blunted its points easily; but the surfaces of the
American steel tools remained clean, and the edges and
points remained sharp. Furthermore, the new tools were
much lighter; the difference of weight between the old-style
and the new steel spades was from three to four
pounds in favor of steel.

If, then, we are to judge from McHardy's report, European
tools in 1876 had not yet adopted improvements
which had been made in America at least sixty or seventy
years earlier. For we have record that "long before" 1814
a member of the American Institute "left off the use of
common iron spades and hoes," and employed a good
workman to make his spade and hoe of trowel stuff, as he
called it, "so hard that no stone could injure its edge, and
so thin that the spade was driven by hand instead of foot,
up to the hub, polished as a razor." With such spades, he
testified, he could dig more in a day than two men with
iron spades, "and dance in the evening."

Not all foreign observers admired the functional simplicity
of American products at the Centennial. A member
of the German delegation objected, for instance, that "certain
objects of daily use which ought to be richly decorated,
like grandfather clocks, show the sad state of American
taste by the complete absence of ornamentation." At
London's Crystal Palace a similar criticism had been implied
in the official commentary on the American exhibits.
"The expenditure of months or years of labour upon a
single article, not to increase its intrinsic value, but solely
to augment its cost or its estimation as an object of virtu,
is not common in the United States," the exhibition catalogue
had announced. On the contrary, both manual and
mechanical labor were applied with direct reference to increasing
the quantity of those articles which were suited to
the wants of a whole people--with the result that the
products of American industry seemed to the exhibition's
officials to have "a character distinct from that of other
countries."

It has frequently been said that Europe surpassed the
United States in the mechanical sciences during the first
half of the nineteenth century, and it is undoubtedly true
that both England and Germany were far ahead of us in
metallurgy and in the perfection and elaborateness of their
heavy machinery. But to some extent, at least, the notion
of European mechanical superiority in this period derives
from the fact that technological history has been written
chiefly by Europeans who were unfamiliar with American
developments. There is ample evidence, however, that
even in the first half of the century mechanical progress
in America was in a number of important respects less inhibited
than that in the Old World. In the development
of machine tools, for instance, and of the precision gauges
and accurate jigs and fixtures which made possible the
mechanical duplication of metal parts for rifles, clocks, and
a hundred other objects, the gunsmiths and mechanics of
New England were far in advance of the Europeans.
When Samuel Colt set up a factory in England in the
early 1850s to supply the foreign market with mass-produced
rifles and muskets and the famous Colt revolvers
which he had been making in Hartford since 1848, he
reluctantly discovered that he had to import from America
both the machines and the men to operate them. English
machines, as he told an investigating committee of the
House of Commons, were not sufficiently precise, and
skilled English workmen seemed to be unable to operate
the machines made in America. Recognition of the superiority
of American machine tools for precision work was
given by the British government itself when it established
the Royal Small Arms factory at Enfield Lock in 1853.
It awarded the contract for practically all of the standard
and special machine tools, and for the jigs, fixtures, and
gauges required to mass-produce the Enfield rifle, to the
firm of Robbins & Lawrence in Windsor, Vermont.

What was lacking among the European mechanics
whom Colt had been unable to employ was the intense
and daring mechanical imagination which foreign commentators
repeatedly remarked as a characteristic of the
American workman, and which remained such a distinctive
feature of our industrial system that, no matter how
decisively England maintained her world leadership in the
scientific development of machines, America--as the London
Times itself observed in 1878--nevertheless developed
"more that is new and practical in mechanism than all
Europe combined."

The whole subject of American mechanical history--or,
to be more inclusive, technological history--has been too
much neglected, especially those aspects of it which reflect
its relationship to cultural history as a whole. The very
materials from which such a history could be written are
scattered, and in many cases have been lost. The scientist
or the technical expert has little interest in regional or
national variants in mechanism, as such; he is concerned
chiefly with the discovery of mechanical principles (which
have no nationality) and their efficient application. [In
1958, ten years after this was written, the first organization
devoted to the serious study of the development and
consequences of technology was established. Called the
Society for the History of Technology, it publishes an
international quarterly entitled Technology and Culture,
with editorial offices at Case Institute of Technology,
Cleveland, Ohio.]

Yet it is evident that machinery developed very
differently in different countries. In the abstract, technology
may be technology wherever it exists, but in actual practice
its internationalism is a myth, or at best an ideal which
has never been attained. During the nineteenth century
wide divergence in national and regional practice existed,
and much may be learned from a consideration of those
differences of which evidence still remains. As early as
1840 the English author of a True Guide to the United
States, published in London for the benefit of British
mechanics and laborers who were planning to emigrate,
summed up his experience of four years' work and five
thousand miles of travel in the new nation by warning that
a mechanic from the "Old Country" should be prepared
to meet with "new and peculiar, if not improved, modes
and ideas and make up his mind also to their immediate
adoption." But unfortunately the author does not discuss
the "new and peculiar" modes and ideas in any detail.

There is, however, valuable evidence regarding such
differences in one branch of mechanics in John Richards'
Treatise on the Construction and Operation of Woodworking
Machinery, published in London in 1872. Richards
was a native of Pennsylvania who lived much of his life
abroad and was known throughout the world as a
designer and builder of all kinds of machinery. As head of
the American firm of Richards, London, & Kelley and of
the English firm of Richards and Atkinson of Manchester,
and as the designer and builder of machinery for the Russian
Royal Arsenal, he originated over a thousand different
machines and was familiar with contemporary practice in
many lands.

Much of his book is of interest only to the specialists
for whom it was intended, but there are a number of passages
which bear on the development of the vernacular
tradition. Richards says, for example, that the distinction
between English and American woodworking machinery
at that time was perhaps the greatest that had "ever
existed in a system of machines both directed to the same,
or nearly the same, purposes." Most of the basic machines
for wood conversion had been invented at the end of the
eighteenth century in England by Samuel Bentham. But
from then on the development took place chiefly in the
United States, largely because wood was so much more
widely used here, not only in building houses, bridges,
and ships but even in framing steam engines and in other
capacities where iron was used in Europe. In 1844 a number
of American machines were imported into England,
but--according to Richards--since "the ruling idea in these
machines was economy in cost and rapid performance in
the hands of skilled men, neither of which elements fitted
them for the English market," practically no use was made
by English builders of the modifications they might have
suggested. It was not until after the Crystal Palace Exhibition
in 1851, where the performance of the American
machines was amply demonstrated, that English engineers
adopted the American improvements.

Necessity, coupled with what Richards called "a strong
ingenuity and boldness of plan," had led to the development
in America of an entire system of machines for sawing,
planing, boring, mortising, and tenoning, plus hundreds
of special machines for manufacturing carriages,
plows, furniture, joiner's work, bent work, and so on.

What Richards meant by ingenuity and boldness can
best be understood by reference to specific machines which
he describes. One of these was the reciprocating mortising
machine; that is, a machine designed to drive a chisel back
and forth into the wood to cut out a square hole. Reciprocating
motion in a machine always involves more vibration--and
consequent wear--than rotary motion, and at the
high speeds required in wood machines the jarring is
severe. A skilled engineer, Richards observed, who was conversant
with all the principles of the operation and the
difficulties to be encountered, would not be inclined to
attempt construction of reciprocating mortising machines,
and European builders avoided them. But in the United
States, "either through an ignorance of the difficulties to
be encountered, a greater boldness in such things, or the
high price of labour," they were extensively made and
generally used.

Another example was the "muley-saw mill," which originated
in, and was largely confined to, the Western states.
This was an unprecedented device which seemed to defy
all the accepted notions about reciprocating--as distinguished
from circular--saws. The blades of reciprocating
saws had always been operated under tension--that is,
tightly stretched between upper and lower frames, which
must be strong enough to stand heavy transverse and compressive
strain as they moved up and down. The weight
of these frames tended to limit the rate of teeth movement
of the saw, thereby reducing the saw's efficiency. The
muley-saw was simply an expedient to increase the cutting
speed of the blade by dispensing with the heavy-tension
frame and all possible weight in the reciprocating parts.
The blade was left slack, merely guided--above and below
the log--by light lateral supports of wood which prevented
it from bending. The result was, surprisingly, that the
lumber was "cut more true, as to dimensions, than that
cut on mills of any other kind; just the opposite of what
would be expected from the plan of operating a saw without tension."

Repeatedly through Richards' book one encounters evidence
that Americans produced bold and original machines "which
upon theoretical deductions would scarcely
have been made." This does not, however, mean that all
American machinery approached the high level of
mechanical perfection which was standard in England. It did
not, for a number of reasons. For one thing, European
machines were less likely to be improvised than those made
in the United States; they were rarely made for the
personal use of the designer, or even of the buyer, but rather
for a workman employed by the buyer, and this required
that they be made to operate as nearly as possible without
the intelligence of the workman, even if the original cost
was high. In the United States, however, machines were
frequently made for the designer's own use, and were
usually sold, as Richards noted, "only to those who use
them and understand their use." Most of the early American
woodworking machines, for example, were designed
and built by carpenters, cabinetmakers, and shipbuilders
for their own use. To these men iron was a new material.
They had in mind "no constants, or rules for proportions,
like an engineer or machinist, but blindly supplied a shaft
here, a pulley there, with bolts and framing to support
them," very much as they would have made a house or a
piece of furniture.

As Richards puts it, the carpenter carried out his architectural
ideas in framing his woodworking machines; "the
metal was disposed in scrolls and network, and all
conceivable forms except those that the strains would indicate,
figures of vines and shrubbery, 'pomegranates and lily-
work' were raised in relief, the whole was painted in gorgeous
hues, and as if to cap the climax, the rough iron
surfaces were generally finished off with a coat of transparent
varnish." (See
Fig.1) In ways like this the
cultivated
tradition in America, acting through the agency of
craft techniques, interacted with, and modified, the
vernacular. But the influence of the cultivated tradition was
largely confined thus to surfaces; the carpenter-builders
may have trimmed their woodworking machines with
extravagant and uncouth decorations, but the operation of
their machines was not open to such criticism. We have
it on Richards' authority that nowhere in the world had
machines for making doors, sash, and joiner work
generally, equaled those made by these carpenter-builders. If
they lacked the finish and elaborateness of European
machines, that was characteristic of a tradition in which, as
Richards said, "the movement and application of the cutting
edge was the prime object, everything else unimportant."

Actually, whatever was built or made in the vernacular
was likely to be marked by constraint and simplicity. There
was no room in such a tradition for diffuseness, there were
no resources to spare for the ornate, and it was merely
sound sense to design a thing as economically as one could.
But in the United States these qualities seem to have
become especially characteristic. We had to have machines
and tools that would work well in a rough land, would
economize labor, and would save the owner from running
to far-off shops for repairs. This meant light, simple, tough
tools. But as time went on even elaborate machinery took
on distinctive qualities. W. F. Durfee, one of the judges
at the Centennial, commended the metalworking machines
made by Pratt and Whitney of Hartford, Connecticut, for
"the admirable character of their general design, which
shows the result of careful study and large experience
applied to the determination of the proportion and union of
parts in the several tools, with the view of eliminating
unnecessary details, thus at once cheapening their
construction and improving their qualities as working machines."

The great Corliss steam engine in the Centennial's
Machinery Hall was a contemporary masterpiece of this
tradition in design. The largest and most powerful engine that
had ever been built up to that time, it was installed at the
exhibition to provide power for all the lathes, grinders,
drills, weaving machines, printing presses, and other
machinery displayed by the various exhibitors. It weighed
altogether 1,700,000 pounds, yet so perfectly was it made
that it worked almost as quietly and with as little vibration
as a watch.

In large engines of this kind it had long been customary
for the designers to strive for architectural or other
ornamental effects. Important engines, here and abroad, were
usually framed with elaborate Gothic arches or Corinthian
columns (see Fig.2);
struts and braces which by every
engineering requirement should have been straight lines
were often disposed in graceful curves. By contrast with
such engines the Corliss design was unequivocally severe,
and before the exhibition was opened to the public many
commentators, including the editor of the Scientific
American, thought that it would therefore be disappointing to
the general public.

But to anyone who reads the mass of contemporary
comment on the exhibition it is obvious that the commentators
need not have worried. Even those who, like the correspondent
of the Manufacturer and Builder, had at first
criticized "the undoubted clumsiness of the design," grudgingly
admitted after the exhibition opened that the engine
looked "much better in motion than it did when standing
still."

People said all the fine things that duty required about
the pictures and statues in Memorial Hall, but in the
presence of the Corliss engine they were exalted. It stood
there at the center of the twelve-acre building, towering
forty feet above its platform, not an idealization but an
unmitigated fact. Yet to the thousands who saw it, it was
more than merely the motive power for the miles of shafting
which belted their energy to machines throughout the
building. (See
Fig.3)

Consciously or unconsciously, each visitor in his own
way testified to its aesthetic impact. Sixty years later the
Midwestern poet, Harriet Monroe, remembered being taken
from Chicago to Philadelphia to visit the Centennial and
recorded that she, at sixteen, was far more impressed by
the Corliss engine "turning its great wheels massively"
than by any of the art exhibitions. "Josiah Allen's wife," the
perennially popular humorist-philosopher of Samantha at
the Centennial and a dozen later "Samantha" books, had
spoken for thousands of ordinary citizens when she wrote
that "that great 'Careless Enjun' alone was enough to run
anybody's idees up into majestic heights and run 'em round
and round into lofty circles and spears of thought they
hadn't never thought of runnin' into before." And the
French sculptor Bartholdi said in an official report to his
government that the engine had "the beauty and almost
the grace of the human form." It was such engines which
led a London Times correspondent to report that "the
American mechanizes as an old Greek sculptured, as the
Venetian painted." Even the Brahminic Atlantic Monthly
concluded rhetorically that "surely here, and not in literature,
science, or art, is the true evidence of man's creative
power; here is Prometheus unbound."

Not often were the technological elements of our
environment welded into such a vernacular masterpiece. One
could scarcely expect the millennium in the turbulent life
of nineteenth-century America. But it is essential to realize
that in the very decades which our cultural historians have
called the ugliest and bleakest in our history--the years of
"chromo-civilization" and the "Gilded Age"--American
people had developed skills and knowledge which enabled
them to create patterns of clean, organic, and indigenous
beauty out of the crude materials of the technological
environment.

Most people, of course, failed to recognize in such
patterns the substance of art. Inherited notions of beauty and
the influences of education interfered with any such
recognition. A typical account of the Centennial recorded that
"although the first thought would be that no arrangement
of axes, hatchets, picks, shovels, etc., could be made that
would be pleasing to the eye," an exhibit of such articles
was nevertheless "attractive."

Such an attitude inevitably encouraged those attempts
to decorate machinery which we have already noted. So
prevalent were architectural details in nineteenth-century
machinery that it has frequently been assumed that the
early designers themselves were originally architects, but
there is considerable evidence that this was not the case.
Drawings of new machines--other than rough sketches on
boards, or chalk marks on the floor--were seldom used in
the early years of the nineteenth century. Toward the
middle of the century, to be sure, advertisements occasionally
appear like that of G. P. Randall, "Architect and Builder,"
who announced in the pages of a Vermont newspaper in
1846 that he would design not only churches, residences,
and bridges, but also "simple and complicated machinery,
stoves, etc." But early machines were designed out of the
inventor's head, as it were, and changes were made as the
work progressed. Since most of these machines were built
largely of wood (metal and metal-working facilities being
scarce), machine building came into the realm of the
cabinetmaker, who had the necessary knowledge and tools.
The United States Patent Office for many years required
a small-sized working model of an invention instead of the
formal drawings required today, and a cabinetmaker
usually made the model if the inventor himself did not do so.
Since the patterns for the finished machine would closely
resemble the model, patternmaking gradually developed as
a branch of the cabinetmaker's trade. Accustomed to
making furniture, and acquainted with architectural detail
through the making of woodwork "trim" for house builders,
the skilled craftsman quite naturally embellished the
prosaic machine patterns with scrollwork, claw feet, delicately
carved legs, and fluted columns.

Opposed to this transferred ornamental habit there was
no tradition, no codified grammar, of technological design,
but only an intuitive sense of appropriate form. William
Sellers, of Philadelphia, for instance (whom the English
designer Whitworth is said to have called the greatest
mechanical engineer in the world), simply went on the theory
that "if a machine was right, it would look right." (See Fig.4) John Fritz, one
of the important figures in the
development of the Bessemer process in the United States,
was typical of the empirical engineers. One of his favorite
remarks after he had finished work on a new machine
which he had designed was: "Now, boys, we have got her
done, let's start her up and see why she doesn't work." By
and large American mechanical engineers adopted original
methods of design, taking the problem presented to them
and working out the design (as Joseph M. Wilson
expressed it) "without any blind adherence to old
established forms or precedents."

This empirical attitude was characteristic of almost all
early efforts to pattern the technological environment. The
men who designed and built the clipper ships of the 1840s
and 1850s worked in much the same way as Sellers did
in the designing of his machine tools, and the essential
characteristics of their designs were the same. Economy
of line, lightness, strength, and freedom from meaningless
ornament made Donald McKay's Flying Cloud and
Sovereign of the Seas not only two of the swiftest sailing ships
of their time but also two of the most beautiful vessels
that ever sailed the ocean.

The day of the clippers was brief. During the very years
when they were the monarchs of the seas, steamships were
being developed and perfected to a point where they would
inevitably drive the clippers out of existence. But in steamship
design, likewise, the vernacular tradition developed
its characteristic qualities.

On the Ohio and Mississippi a distinctive type of vessel
was developed on principles some of which had been
worked out by a man whose name scarcely ever appears
in the history books: Henry Miller Shreve. Attempts by
Robert Fulton and other Easterners to design steamboats
for the Western rivers had ended in several costly failures.
Shreve had grown up on the rivers, working as bargeman
and later as captain of the Enterprise, the first steamer that
ever ascended the Mississippi to Louisville. He knew what
the rivers required, and when he built the Washington
in 1816 it was in essential respects unlike any other steam
vessel then known. Previously, the boilers had always been
placed in the hold of the vessel and the cylinders set
upright. Shreve set his machinery on the deck, thus permitting
the use of flat-bottomed, shallow hulls similar to the
keelboats which had long been familiar on Western rivers.
Further, he designed and built a high-pressure engine
with a cylinder which was horizontal, instead of vertical
as in the high-pressure engines of Oliver Evans. And the
success of the Washington established Shreve's system as
the basis of all Western steamboats for many years.

Nevertheless, there were countless variants in the
design of American river steamers. In 1838 an English engineer,
David Stevenson, reported in his Sketch of the Civil
Engineering of North America that after minutely examining
all the most approved American steamboats he could
trace no genera, principles which had served as guides for
their construction.

Every American steamboat builder holds opinions of his
own [he wrote], which are generally founded, not on
theoretical principles, but on deductions drawn from a
close examination of the practical effects of the different
arrangements and proportions adopted in the construction
of different steamboats . . .; and the natural
consequence is, that, even at this day, no two steamboats
are alike, and few of them have attained the age of six
months without undergoing some material alteration.

In transatlantic navigation, of course, these shallow-draft
boats would be useless, and in that field English
builders took a quick lead. But even here the vernacular
tradition modified the design of American ships. In 1853
Captain Mackinnon of the Royal Navy crossed on the
American Collins liner Baltic, built by Jacob Bell, of New
York, and shortly thereafter published an article comparing
the Baltic's design and performance with those of
English ships. Basically, he found, the American ship was
superior. An English vessel would have a heavy bow with
a vast bowsprit, "an absolute excrescence," the captain
angrily called it, "a bow-plunging, speed-stopping, money-
spending, and absurd acquiescence in old-fashioned prejudices
about appearance...." But American ships were
hampered by no such devotion to traditional design. They
had, instead, a long and gently graduated bow without a
bowsprit, with the result that they rode the waves gently
even in a heavy sea, without shipping water and without
the shock and stagger of the blunt-bowed Britishers.

The Baltic and the other American steamships of the
early fifties were designed and built by the same shipyards
that were turning out the famous clippers. Steam
clippers and sailing clippers were constructed side by side.
Of course the steamships, not being intended to carry an
immense spread of canvas, could be much narrower than
any sailing vessel that had ever been designed. But the
contemporary newspapers in maritime cities throughout
the world were full of descriptions of sailing clippers which
sound very much like Captain Mackinnon's account of the
steamship Baltic. The Mauritius Commercial Gazeteer
(December 7, 1855) said the bow of the Herald of the
Morning, designed by Samuel Pook, of New York, was
"so sharp as to take the form of a razor, the keel forming
the edge; there are no rails at the bow, which is quite
unencumbered."

The clipper ships, like the Western riverboats, were not
any one man's invention. Rather, they were a composite
creation, the product of literally scores of keen minds.
McKay himself declared in an interview that before
making the model of his Stag Hound (1850) he had
familiarized himself with "all the celebrated clipper models."
The designer did not know how his ship would perform
until it was actually put to the test. He borrowed ideas
from vessels which were under sail and combined them
with his own intuitive sense of the lines which were
appropriate to the requirements of the ships he intended to
build. George Steers, designer of the schooner-yacht America
which won the international yacht race in 1851 and
brought to this country the prize cup which is still called
by its name, was particularly proud of a model he was
working on shortly before his death. It tapered so beautifully
from the center that the eye could not find the exact
center spot--"just like the well-formed leg of a woman,"
from which, he said, he had borrowed his idea.

Magnificent as these ships were, the railroad locomotive
was the dominant symbol of technological progress during
the nineteenth century. As would be expected, the
design and performance of American locomotives revealed
the characteristics of the vernacular tradition and consequently
differed considerably from contemporary European engines.
We can perhaps get the clearest sense of
this difference by referring to accounts of contemporary
American civil engineers. These experts profoundly
admired English locomotives, as they did all English
machinery. United States Commissioner William Anderson, in
his official report on railway apparatus exhibited at the
Universal Exposition in Paris, 1878, stated that "the
locomotives exhibited in the British section were, as may be
said of the machinery exhibits of the United Kingdom
generally, remarkable for the skill, the directness, the
strong common sense, and the faithfulness illustrated in
their construction." And Charles Barnard, writing in 1879,
flatly asserted that "the finest piece of steam mechanism
in the world is undoubtedly the English locomotive
engine."

Barnard goes on to describe these engines: a cylindrical
boiler and a capacious firebox, resting upon a massive and
rigid frame of iron plates, which in turn was supported
by wheels of extraordinary size and strength. In front
there might be a pair of smaller wheels, but these like the
larger ones were fastened by their axles to the rigid frame
which supported the boiler. "One cannot," he wrote, "fail
to admire the thoroughly English solidity and stability of
the machine.... Every part of the mechanism is admirable--strong,
accurate, and fitted to its work with marvellous precision."

But the moment the English locomotive was taken from
its island lines--relatively straight, and as level as money
and labor could make them--and was used in, say, Canada
or Australia, it exhibited a number of defects, especially a
certain want of pliability. For in those countries, as in the
United States, distances were so vast, territory was so
thinly populated, capital resources were so limited, and
speed of construction was so essential, that the railroads
had to negotiate considerable grades and abrupt curves
without too much insistence on a straight line or a level
roadbed. On such winding and uneven roads the English
locomotive was either derailed by the curves, or wrenched
and twisted by having only three of its four wheels on the
track at one time.

To cope with American roadbeds a very different
locomotive was developed which, to anyone accustomed to
English engines; would seem a "crazy affair, as loose-jointed
as a basket." It had no massive frame. In Barnard's
words:

The framework is light and open, and yet strong. The
supporting springs that take the weight of the machine
from the axles are not secured directly to the frame,
but to the levers extending both across and along the
engine.... The engine is thus hung upon the fulcrums
of a system of levers, balanced equally in every direction.
Let the road follow its own wayward will, be low
here and high there . . . the basket-like flexibility of
the frame and its supports . . . adjusts the engine to
its road at every instant of its journey.

Further, it had a group of small wheels at the front--the
pilot truck, or track feeler--which was designed to carry
the engine around sharp curves. This truck not only was
supported on equalizing bars and levers, as were the driving
wheels, but also incorporated an arrangement which
shifted the weight of the engine so that, like a circus rider,
the engine leaned inward on curves to counteract centrifugal
force. (See
Fig.5, Left).

The characteristics of the American locomotive had
appeared early. The first really successful railroad
locomotive in the world--George Stephenson's Rocket--was built
in England in 1829, yet in the very next year H. L. B.
Lewis, of New York, was advertising his invention of a
simple contrivance, consisting of wheels attached to the
front and rear of the engine, "so arranged that they have
a horizontal and lateral motion, so as to admit of their
adapting their position to any curve in the track, or any
inequality on the top sides of the rails." Two years later,
in 1832, Jervis designed the Brother Jonathan--the first
locomotive to use the lead-truck principle. Five years later
Garrett and Eastwick built the Hercules, the first engine
on which a driving-wheel equalizer invented by Joseph
Harrison, Jr., was used; the weight of the engine rested
upon the center of a separate frame, the driving-wheel
axles being placed in pedestals or supports which allowed
the wheels to adjust to uneven track. In 1842 Eastwick
and Harrison's Mercury combined a highly flexible system
of truck suspension with a further development of the
equalized driving-wheel arrangement, and an extremely
light frame. From that point onward, the essential characteristics
of the American locomotive rapidly developed. Note1

For about twenty years after 1850, it is true, extraneous
attempts were made to apply "art" to the iron horse. As
in the large stationary steam engines described earlier, this
art consisted, in large measure, in architectural detail, used
in constructing the engine cabs which after 1850 became
common on American locomotives. Baldwin's eight-wheeled
engine of that year had a cab with large decorative panels
on the sides, Corinthian columns supporting an
ornamental cornice, and Gothic arched windows. As late
as 1868 the Nathaniel McKay, designed by and named
after the son of the clipper-ship designer, Donald McKay,
retained the Gothic point in its cab windows. But by 1875
the return of the clean, functional form is reflected in the
restrained and attractive design of John C. Davis' engine
for the Baltimore and Ohio.
(See Fig.5, Right)

The characteristics of economy, simplicity, and flexibility
which the products of the vernacular displayed so
clearly in the United States are closely related to the
design of the American system of industrial production
itself. There is a clue to this relationship in the comment
already quoted from the catalogue of London's Crystal
Palace Exhibition in 1851: that productive labor in the
United States was "applied with direct reference to
increasing the number or quantity of articles suited to the
wants of a whole people."

Let us return for a moment to those long-barreled rifles
which Washington's frontiersmen demonstrated on
Cambridge Common. Each of those rifles was made by hand,
and because they were handmade, no two were exactly
alike. If more guns were needed, skilled craftsmen had to
be found to make them, and each gun that was made had
to be shaped and fitted with individual care.

As a matter of fact, in 1798, when war with France
seemed imminent, the government found itself in need of
large quantities of rifles. To meet that need, Eli Whitney,
of Connecticut, agreed to manufacture "ten thousand
stand of Arms, or Muskets, with Bayonets and Ramrods
complete" in two years--an undreamed-of quantity in a
land where skilled gunsmiths were rare. To achieve this
task Whitney proposed "to substitute correct and effective
operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which
is acquired only by long experience."

Whitney's part in the development of what came to be
called the "American system" of manufacture, employing
machine-made, standardized, interchangeable parts, is less
well known than his invention of the cotton gin. The gin's
more immediate and obvious economic and social effects
commanded the historian's interest long before the origins
of mass-production seemed important. But interchangeable-parts
manufacture, which had been introduced in
France by H. Blanc in the 1780s, and which Whitney and
the mechanics at the United States Government arsenals
developed here in the next two or three decades, is one
of the basic constituents of modern civilization. Whitney
may not deserve so much credit as he claimed in connection
with the introduction and elaboration of the system.
Recent investigations by Robert S. Woodbury show that
Blanc himself was anticipated by a Swedish maker of clock
gears who, fifty years earlier, made parts by machinery so
precisely that they were interchangeable. But quite apart
from the question of who deserves the credit for inventing
such a system, the fact remains that in America it was
rapidly developed and was soon applied to a number of
manufactures. By the early 1870s it had been applied so
extensively to the manufacture of sewing machines, for example,
that 600,000 were made and sold in a single year.
Firearms, agricultural machinery, watches, and even
locomotives were produced by this so-called American system
of manufacture.

There is no need to describe here in detail the development
of this system, or how it works in specific cases. The
essential point in the present context is that it had
collaborated with all the other factors we have considered to
strengthen and accentuate the characteristic qualities of
the American vernacular tradition. On the one hand, if
rifles, reapers, sewing machines, and watches had not
already been characterized by simplicity and plainness, it
would have been considerably more difficult to apply the
new system in the first place; on the other hand, once the
system was applied, it inevitably encouraged further
simplification and further stripping away of non-essentials.
(An American cast-steel plow, as manufactured by the
famous Collins Company of Hartford in the early seventies,
weighed only forty pounds; whereas a contemporary English
wrought-iron plow, which could cut a furrow of equal
width and depth, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds.)
Furthermore, an industrial structure based upon such a
system is pointless unless it turns out large quantities of
goods. To some people mass production still seems necessarily
to imply inferior products, but there is no technological
reason why it should not always produce superior
goods. When mass-produced American watches were
subjected to comparative tests at the Centennial, only twenty-five
years after the new system had been introduced in
their manufacture, two different makes surpassed the best
performances of fine Swiss watches. There is, to be sure,
nothing in the mass-production process which insures that
its machines will necessarily be used to turn out the
highest-quality products; but the quality can be high if
the creators and owners of the machine so desire. Furthermore,
the products are uniform and can be made available
to more people and at lower prices than is otherwise
possible.

The rapidity with which America adopted the new
manufacturing procedure, and the relative slowness with
which it was accepted in Europe, may well have had
some connection with another peculiarity of the American
industrial system. Writing in 1841, the English mechanical
authority Robert Willis noted that in Great Britain
power was transmitted from the prime mover (a steam
engine, water wheel, or turbine) to the various machines
in different parts of a factory by means of long shafts and
toothed gear wheels, but in America by large belts, moving
rapidly and quietly. Toothed-wheel transmission is by
nature a rigid setup; if the location of the machinery is
changed, new shafts and new gears must be arranged. But
a system of belts and pulleys is comparatively flexible; the
arrangement of machinery can be changed with considerable
freedom. It was therefore relatively easy for American
manufacturers to rearrange existing factories in a manner
appropriate to the new system of interchangeable parts. Note2

Mass production as we know it today, however,
depends as much upon mechanical handling of materials as
upon interchangeable parts, and the development of
mechanical conveyors and their use in an integrated
manufacturing procedure can be traced to an even earlier date
than Whitney's system. Thirteen years before Whitney set
up his armory in New Haven, Oliver Evans built a flour
mill in Newcastle County, Delaware, in which he installed
belt conveyors, screw conveyors, endless-chain bucket
elevators, and, as Joseph W. Roe has noted, nearly all of the
modern transporting devices in substantially their present
form. A few years later these devices were installed in
Thomas Ellicott's mill near Baltimore (See Fig.6), in
which, as Evans wrote, they performed "every necessary
movement of the grain and meal, from one part of the
mill to another, or from one machine to another, through
all the various operations, from the time the grain is
emptied from the Wagoner's bag, or from the measure on
board the ship, until it is completely manufactured into
flour . . . ready for packing into barrels, for sale or exportation.
All of which is performed by the force of water,
without the aid of manual labor, except to set the different
machines in motion."

It is this system of mechanical handling plus the system
of interchangeable parts which united to make modern
mass production, and it is strange that so little attention
has been paid to their development by the historians of
our civilization. Whitney is usually spoken of only as the
inventor of the cotton gin, and Evans--if he is mentioned
at all--is referred to as the inventor of an ungainly,
amphibious steam carriage called Eructor Amphibolis. But it
is their contributions to the design of the industrial
structure itself, to the fundamental principles of mass production,
that command our attention here. For it is to them
that we owe the manufacturing system which made the
products of technological design available to great numbers of people.

It was Henry Ford, aided by such ingenious technicians
as C. W. Avery, William Klann, and Charles E. Sorensen,
who finally combined Whitney's system of interchangeable
parts and Evans' system of mechanical conveyors to create
the modern system of power-driven assembly-line
manufacture. When two French engineers, Arnold and Faurote,
published their study of Ford Methods and Ford Shops
in 1915 they described in some detail the Ford system of
motor and chassis assembly. Ford practice, they noted, was
to place the most suitable component of an assembly on
elevated ways or rails, and carry or push it past successive
stationary sources of component supply and past
successive groups of workmen who fixed the various components
to the basic part of the assembly. Since the components
were perfectly gauged and absolutely interchangeable,
each piece could be affixed in a predetermined time and
the whole assembly could be chain-driven along the rails
at a uniform rate.

Arnold and Faurote stated that Ford had introduced
this system in 1914, and they credited it as "the very first
example of chain-driving an assembly in progress of assembling."
Ford himself, writing in 1923, said he had installed
the first moving assembly line (for flywheel magnetos)
"along about April 1, 1913." But revolutionary as the Ford
assembly line was, it rested upon a conception which had
long been developing in American industry. For the idea
of conveying a job mechanically past workmen at fixed
stations, each of whom performs a special operation, came
directly from the Chicago meat packers, and the basic
procedure in their plants had originated in the hog-slaughtering
houses of Cincinnati almost eighty years before Ford
adapted it.

The earliest detailed account of the Cincinnati slaughterhouse
procedure seems to be that published in 1861 by
Charles L. Flint. According to Flint, the carcasses of the
hogs were slid from the bleeding platform (where their
throats had been cut) into a long scalding vat, floated
along through it to a lever-operated contrivance which
lifted them out onto the higher end of a long, inclined
table down which they were slid past eight or nine pairs
of men, each of whom had some special job to do in the
process of shaving and cleaning the hog. At the end of
the table the carcass was hung from a hook on the rim
of a huge horizontal wheel, about six feet above the floor,
which revolved around a perpendicular shaft. As soon as
the hog was swung on its hook the wheel turned one
eighth of its circuit, bringing the next hook to the table
to receive its carcass and carrying the first carcass a
distance of four feet to the workers who performed the first
operation in the process of gutting it. Successive turns
carried the carcass to other workers who in turn performed
their jobs until finally, just before the hook returned to the
table for another hog, the gutted and washed carcass was
lifted off and carried to another part of the building and
hung up to cool.

Sometime in the early sixties the horizontal wheel was
replaced by an overhead railway loop, around which hooks
traveled on pulleys, carrying the carcass past the workers'
stations until, at the end of the loop, they swung off on a
straightaway along which they conveyed it to the cooling
chamber. (See
Fig.7). Thus it was no longer necessary
to carry the carcass by hand from the end of the
disassembly line to the storage room, as it had been with
the wheel conveyor. But in all essential respects the
principle of the mechanized assembly line remained
unchanged.

Just when the system Flint describes was introduced
we do not know, but his account indicates that it was
already well established in Cincinnati by 1860, and there
is clear evidence that in principle, at least, it originated
much earlier. When Harriet Martineau visited Cincinnati
in 1835 she was driven about the town by Dr. Daniel
Drake (of whom more in a later chapter), who showed
her the slaughterhouses on Deer Creek. She did not want
to see inside, but the doctor described their method of
operation and she recorded what he told her.

One man [she noted] drives into one pen or chamber
the reluctant hogs, to be knocked on the head by
another whose mallet is forever going. A third sticks the
throats, after which they are conveyed by some clever
device to the cutting-up room, and thence to the
pickling, and thence to the packing and branding. [Italics
mine.]

One wishes Miss Martineau had been able to stomach the
"reeking carcasses" and had seen and described the clever
device which conveyed them from station to station. But
whatever it was, a horizontal wheel or other conveyor, it
is clear that the basic system must have been essentially
the same as that described by Flint.

Our lack of precise knowledge about the origin of the
system is an indication of the extent to which we have
hitherto neglected the underlying technological factors of
our civilization. Up until recently it has frequently been
asserted that the system Ford took over from the meat
packers and made the core of modern mass-production industry
had originated in the seventies or eighties and had
thus been a product of the surge of industrialization which
is held to have transformed America in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century. Siegfried Giedion, in his history of
mechanization, dates the system from the late sixties or
early seventies, on the basis of patent-office records and
such information as he was able to get from Cincinnati's
local historians. Yet Miss Martineau's account is pretty
conclusive evidence that the industrial system which
Giedion justly calls "the dominant principle ofœ the
twentieth century" had in all its essentials been put into actual
practice more than sixty-five years before that fateful
century began. Whatever the precise date may have been, the
evidence at hand is sufficient to emphasize that the increasing
tempo of industrialization in late nineteenth-century
America was a development of technological factors which
were already deeply rooted in our national experience
during the "agrarian" decades of the thirties and forties. It
should effectively remind us that the technology of mass
production is as indigenous to the United States as the
husking bee.

All this emphasis on mechanical and technological
factors in nineteenth-century America may seem to ignore the
fact that until 1860 the United States was primarily an
agricultural country. But the proportion of people engaged
in agriculture, or the relative value of agricultural and
manufactured products, is not the most significant index
of the role of technology in a nation's life.

Before the American land could be a union in fact as
well as in name, the land itself had to be made smaller
and more compact than it had been when it took Washington
nine days to proceed from Philadelphia to
Cambridge to take command of the Revolutionary Army. A
number of forces contributed to this contraction and
unification of the continent. There were threats from the
outside which drove the people to unite in self-protection;
there was a vast increase in population to fill the empty
spaces; there were the people's common interests in
development of new land, in conquest of the wilderness;
there was the homesick need of the pioneer to keep in
touch with those left behind in the settled regions; there
was the invasion of Washington by the frontier in the
person of Andrew Jackson; and there was the belief in Union
of dynamic idealists like Lincoln. But, as the technological
historian Roger Burlingame has said, "without the
continuous, inevitable progress of technology--of which, indeed,
very few were conscious--all these causes would
have failed to operate."

Before the Declaration of Independence there were
apparently only two steam engines in the thirteen colonies:
one at Passaic, New Jersey, in a copper mine and the other
in a Philadelphia distillery. England had forbidden the
colonies to engage in most industries, in an effort to keep
them dependent on British manufactures. But once the
Revolution was achieved, industrial expansion and
technological invention proceeded at a rapid rate. As a matter
of fact, in the seventeen years between the end of the
Revolutionary War (1783) and the end of the century,
three major technological achievements had already laid
the foundations for future national unification. Whitney's
cotton gin unified the South by giving it a new source of
wealth--cotton--and a common interest in slavery as a
means of exploiting it. Slater's reproduction of English
textile machinery in New England began the Industrial
Revolution in that section and linked it economically to
the South, whose cotton fields supplied the raw materials
for the mills. And finally Fitch's steamboats--later
promoted by Livingston and Fulton and ingeniously adapted
to shallow rivers by Henry Shreve and others--enabled the
pioneer to settle the West and at the same time bound
him inextricably to the East. McCormick's reaper later
made the East and the South dependent on the West for
food, and the railroads and other subsequent inventions
implemented and strengthened the interdependence of all
these diverse regions.

The importance of these factors becomes clear when we
remember that the unity of no other nation in history
rested to a similar degree upon technological foundations.
In the light of that fact the characteristics of the
vernacular assume a special significance in the United States. For
it is clear that they had inadvertently become national in
a way that had nothing to do with the naive nationalism
which patriots had self-consciously demanded from our
literature and our art.

It was this tradition in which were developed, and kept
universally available, certain elements of design and
certain principles of structure which were a direct, uninhibited
response to the new environment and which finally
had decisive influence in the hands of men of skill and
vision. This stream of art often failed to create beauty of
its own. But its patterns at least reflected actuality,
however ugly that actuality often was; and the forms evolved
in it were firmly rooted in contemporary experience.

NOTES

The difference between
American and British locomotives
early in the twentieth century was thus described by the
English railroad expert, Vaughan Pendred, in The Railway
Locomotive, New York, 1908, p. X: "The British locomotive is,
above all others, simple, strong, and carefully finished.... The
American locomotive is the incarnate spirit of opportunism....
In Europe complication is favored rather than disliked.... In
all cases the national character appears to stamp itself on
machinery of every kind." Return

By 1878 the American system of belt
and pulley transmission
was being adopted in Europe. See William T. Porter,
"Machines and Machine Tools," Reports of the United States
Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition, 1878,
Washington, 1880, Vol. IV. Return

(Left) Gothic frame of steam engine designed
by William McAlpine for U. S. Drydock at Brooklyn.(Right) Corinthian frame of steam engine designed by J. T. Sutton
and Co. (from Oliver Byrne, The American Engineer, Draftsman, and
Machinist's Assistant, Philadelphia, 1853).

This vast steam engine, designed without any concessions to
contemporary notions of ornament and decoration, was
the dominant feature of the exhibits in Machinery Hall.
This picture, never before reproduced, is taken from a
chromo-lithograph published in Treasures of Art,
Industry and Manufacture Represented in the
American Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia
1876, Buffalo, New York, 1877.

(Left) Portable riveting
machine, and (right) carwheel boring
mill, both designed by William Sellers
(from The Masterpieces of the
Centennial International Exhibition,
Philadelphia, 1877).

(Left) The express passenger engine built for the Midland
Railway typifies the massive and rigid construction of English
locomotives of the period (from The Scientific American Supplement, No.
27, July 1, 1876).

(Right) The Baltimore and Ohio express engine, designed by John C.
Davis,
master machinist, is typical of the light and flexible locomotives
developed in America (from The Railway Journal, November 17,
1876).

A diagrammatic drawing of Thomas Ellicott's grain mill, near
Baltimore, in which automatic machine production was achieved by
the use of the conveyors, elevators, hopper-boys, and descenders invented
by Oliver Evans (from Evans' The Young Mill-Wright and Miller's
Guide, Philadelphia, 1795).

Interiorof Cincinnati slaughterhouse showing line production and
mechanical handling of materials (from One Hundred Years' Progress of
the United States, Hartford, 1872. An earlier but less detailed
picture of the overhead-rail conveyor was published in Harper's Weekly,
January 11, 1868).